“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” So said the Booker Prize-winning novelist Arundhati Roy.

The author of The God of Small Things is quite right. Technology can help towns and cities to “build back greener” by unleashing the power of digital and data. The coronavirus crisis gave us a glimpse of how technology can transform our daily lives and reduce our impact on the environment but it also exposed serious shortcomings in the broadband services on which we rely.

Global carbon dioxide emissions fell by 6.4% in 2020, according to analysis by Nature magazine, as Covid-19 curtailed economic, social and transportation activities worldwide and forced a shift to remote work, education and healthcare.

For those with ultrafast connectivity, the switch online was painless and often more productive, but many have found themselves left behind: Ofcom has said barely one quarter of homes have access to gigabit-speed broadband while as many as 6% of homes are entirely without the internet.

We believe the issues of connectivity and carbon emissions are entwined for towns and cities. Simply put, the more powerful the connectivity, the more we can do online – and the less we need to travel. This is significant because transport represents almost a quarter of Europe’s greenhouse gas emissions and is the main cause of air pollution in urban areas, according to the European Commission.

Witness the growth of the 15-minute city in post-Covid neighbourhood planning around the world, a concept first floated at COP21 back in 2015 in which people live, shop and work within a short radius.

The UK government has set a target for at least 85% of UK premises to have access to gigabit broadband by 2025. The deployment is being hindered by problems including planning regulations, business rates treatment of fibre, requirements for new-build properties and a skills shortage adding costs and delays to the programme.

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In the meantime, the internet is assuming a growing importance in our personal, social and economic lives. The next wave of technological development – new applications based on machine learning and artificial intelligence – will depend on lightning-fast connectivity.

Innovation can overcome these barriers. In Edinburgh, we have launched Britain’s first major wireless gigabit broadband service in the city centre, bringing that lightning-fast connectivity to the Old and New Towns without the disruption of having to dig up streets in a World Heritage Site and sidestepping the infrastructure challenges faced by fibre providers.

WeLink radios transmit a tiny fraction of the power compared to mainstream 5G equipment. The kit is above ground and accessible, meaning it can be constantly upgraded. And it isn’t just restricted to built-up urban areas: we are actively exploring how this wireless technology can be deployed across remote rural locations to benefit households and tourism businesses.

WeLink’s vice president of technology Dr Ahsan Naim has highlighted how fixed and mobile networks are typically designed according to the needs of download traffic but with the expanding use of cloud-based services like Zoom and Netflix, the upload-to-download ratio is changing as devices are increasingly required to send traffic up to the cloud.

Anyone who has experienced a laggy video call over the last 20 months will get the point. Remote work, education and healthcare and industrial applications for improving energy efficiency and meeting net zero targets all demand stronger upload speeds.

The solution to this traffic jam is a broadband service that can offer symmetric capacity to the user, or equal upload and download speeds. That’s our contribution in practice.

Tech and innovation such as this can help cut carbon emissions by reducing unnecessary travel and create jobs by providing gigabit broadband for the new processes, services and business models needed to decarbonise our economy. It can unleash the power of digital and data and truly help Britain to “build back greener” – and open the gateway between one world and the next.